Case Number 27127: Small Claims Court

THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1933)

The Charge

They found a love they dare not touch!

The Case

A few weeks back, I reviewed a Sam Fuller movie called The Crimson
Kimono that, from the cover, basically guaranteed an insanely racist
anti-Asian movie. But that didn't make sense because, while completely crazy,
Fuller was no racist. It turns out that the marketing, apparently, was designed
to stoke latent post-war bigotry out of masses, because the movie is the
specific opposite of what I thought it would be. But that doesn't mean that
didn't happen all the time in the early days of film; Orientalism was all over
the place from the silent days on. This is proven to me once again in The
Bitter Tea of General Yen, everything I expected from the previous movie and
a plainly awful experience.

Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck, The Miracle Woman) is a young woman
who has come to China to marry her missionary husband. Trouble is, when she
arrives, an uprising breaks out, the couple gets separated in a crowd, and Megan
gets knocked over the head. Her boyfriend, in classic romantic fashion, just
goes away, while General Yen (Nils Asther, Laugh, Clown, Laugh) takes her
away to his palace to keep her safe. She feels, though, that she's been
kidnapped, and for good reason, but slowly, in spite of her rampant anti-Asian
views, she falls in love with Yen and forgets about her original romance.

I'll grant that I'm viewing The Bitter Tea of General Yen from a 21st
Century perspective, but I really can't do anything else. Almost from the first
scene, racism is thrown in the viewer's face and it's unwatchable. A
conversation between Barbara Stanwyck and an older preacher about the savagery
of the Chinaman turns into a fast pan to a sniveling, moustache-twirling Chinese
villain. That guy isn't actually a character, though; just a caricature of the
mysterious Asian man whose intentions, while totally unknown, are probably
sinister.

But they're not, and that's the really weird thing about The Bitter Tea
of General Yen. Every shot, every angle, and every line of dialog is
delivered in such a way as to make General Yen, not the previous Chinese man (I
promise I'll never use the Chinaman term again, but it was appropriate for the
situation), seem like a slaver, but he's actually a really nice guy. Over ninety
minutes, Megan discover that, indeed, not every Chinese person is a disgusting
heathen, but of course just one of them.

And, of course, that one Chinese person is actually Dutch. Not in the movie,
but in real life, which is nothing new, but to pretend that Nils Asther, from
one of the world's whitest countries, is Asian is preposterous and insulting.
It's 1932 and I recognize that that the world was a lot different. Orientalism
was popular and director Frank Capra (The Miracle Woman) is trading on it
big time here.

Virtually unwatchable, The Bitter Tea of General Yen is saved in a
tiny way by another fine performance from Stanwyck and less-than-usual
woodenness of Nils Asther, terrible makeup and accent aside. Otherwise, it's a
racist, uninteresting story. There are plenty of movies from this era that you
probably haven't seen yet. Try one of them.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen appears in all its racist glory from
Sony on their Choice Collection on-demand service. The full frame image is
perfectly acceptable, with accurate contrast and not too much damage for its
age. The mono sound, too, is fine, but nothing special. There are no extras on
the DVD.

Well, sometimes it's good to see the way that non-white characters were
treated in the early decades of cinema, I guess, but that's a fact of history
and, in no way, the marker of a movie anybody would actually want to watch.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen is absolutely one of the most racist movies
that I've ever seen and, even for Barbara Stanwyck, who I will always love,
there is zero reason to watch this movie.